Haydn Vol. I

go to London Symphonies – an introduction

Symphony No. 101 D major Hob I:101

›The Clock‹

When Haydn set out for London for the second time in late January 1794, and knowing concert life there would begin almost as soon as he arrived, he already had a good deal of music ready for his English audience, among which – to judge by the paper he wrote it on – the third movement, the minuet and trio, of this symphony, No. 101. But given that the other three movements, though written on English paper, were ready for their first performance on the 3rd March, only a month after his arrival, it seems safe to assume he had already done much of the work on the rest of this symphony also.

In fact, he had already used a version of this minuet the previous year for a mechanical clock with a miniature organ inside it (Haydn, like Mozart and Beethoven, enjoyed writing pieces for mechanical instruments, popular toys at the time).

This is amusing, because the fact that this music previously appeared inside a clock was not why the symphony acquired its famous nickname. This label was attached quite early on specifically to the slow movement with its distinctive and comical tick-tock accompaniment. A huge hit at the first London performance, this ›clock-music‹ was soon afterwards published by itself in a piano arrangement in Vienna as Rondo … Die Uhr, a popular hit to be played at home.

For the English newspapers – and London had one of the liveliest and freest press cultures in Europe at the time – Haydn’s symphonic return to the British capital was a cause of tremendous celebration:
»As usual the most delicious part of the entertainment was a new grand Overture by Haydn… [›Overture‹ was a common word for symphony at that period, especially in England] … the inexhaustible, the wonderful, the sublime Haydn! The first two movements were encored; and the character that pervaded the whole composition was heartfelt joy. Every new Overture he writes, we fear, till it is heard, he can only repeat himself; and we are every time mistaken. Nothing can be more original than the subject of the first movement; and having found a happy subject, no man knows like Haydn how to produce incessant variety, without once departing from it…«

Underneath this delightful journalistic bubble, there is the shaft of a really important insight. What audiences of the time found so astonishing about this music was its fantastical unpredictability, the fact that this composer could write an extremely catchy musical idea (›a happy subject‹) and then from that one idea ›produce incessant variety, without once departing from it‹.

It is worth noting also of this particular symphony that the exhilarating sense of everything being derived in a thousand different ways from one single original idea carries on not just through the first movement but through all four. Whether because Haydn deliberately and seriously chose to do this, or because it simply gave him a passing pleasure, each of the last three movements is filled with the same playful scale-like themes moving up and down that we first hear in the sombre opening bars of the first movement. The idea is everywhere and to listen to this symphony is rather like watching a plant sprouting and growing in front of our ears.

No wonder the English commentators of the time, drawing attention to the ›infinite variety‹ in his music, tumbled over one another to acclaim Haydn, with justice but also with a certain patriotic comedy, as ›the Shakespeare of music‹.

For the English newspapers – and London had one of the liveliest and freest press cultures in Europe at the time – Haydn’s symphonic return to the British capital was a cause of tremendous celebration:
»As usual the most delicious part of the entertainment was a new grand Overture by Haydn… [›Overture‹ was a common word for symphony at that period, especially in England] … the inexhaustible, the wonderful, the sublime Haydn! The first two movements were encored; and the character that pervaded the whole composition was heartfelt joy. Every new Overture he writes, we fear, till it is heard, he can only repeat himself; and we are every time mistaken. Nothing can be more original than the subject of the first movement; and having found a happy subject, no man knows like Haydn how to produce incessant variety, without once departing from it…«

Underneath this delightful journalistic bubble, there is the shaft of a really important insight. What audiences of the time found so astonishing about this music was its fantastical unpredictability, the fact that this composer could write an extremely catchy musical idea (›a happy subject‹) and then from that one idea ›produce incessant variety, without once departing from it‹.

It is worth noting also of this particular symphony that the exhilarating sense of everything being derived in a thousand different ways from one single original idea carries on not just through the first movement but through all four. Whether because Haydn deliberately and seriously chose to do this, or because it simply gave him a passing pleasure, each of the last three movements is filled with the same playful scale-like themes moving up and down that we first hear in the sombre opening bars of the first movement. The idea is everywhere and to listen to this symphony is rather like watching a plant sprouting and growing in front of our ears.

No wonder the English commentators of the time, drawing attention to the ›infinite variety‹ in his music, tumbled over one another to acclaim Haydn, with justice but also with a certain patriotic comedy, as ›the Shakespeare of music‹.

Symphony No. 103 in E flat major Hob I:103

›Drum Roll‹

It was the violinist, composer and entrepreneur Johann Peter Salomon who was most responsible for persuading Haydn to make his two trips to London. Towards the end of 1790 he raised the money and travelled to Vienna to invite the great composer to accompany him to England, and it was he again who persuaded him to come back for his second visit in 1794.

Salomon’s concerts took place in the Hanover Square Concert Rooms, not far from the London intersection nowadays called Oxford Circus, a venue originally established a few years earlier by the German composers Johann Christian Bach and Carl Friedrich Abel. But in the winter of 1794 to 1795, the ongoing effects of war in Europe and economic disarray at home meant that Salomon was obliged to close his series and combine with a rival company occupying a newly-built concert hall attached to the King’s Theatre, Haymarket, a few streets south and east of Hanover Square. As the King’s Theatre was mostly known for opera, these new concerts were called ›Concerts at the Opera‹ and it was in the theatre’s ›New Room‹ that Haydn gave all his last London concerts between January and May 1795, including the first performances of his last three symphonies.

His penultimate, No. 103 › Drum Roll‹, was first performed in the New Room on 2nd March 1795, almost exactly a year to the day since the first performance of the 101st Symphony in nearby Hanover Square. And as with nearly all Haydn’s performances in London, it was a huge success: »Another new Overture, by the fertile and enchanting Haydn, was performed; which, as usual, had continual strokes of genius, both in air and harmony. The Introduction excited the deepest attention, the Allegro charmed, the Andante was encored, the Minuets, especially the Trio, were playful and sweet, and the last movement was equal, if not superior to the preceding.«

On the face of it, this might not seem the most revealing review. But the critic was not wrong in observing that »the Introduction excited the deepest attention«. In all of Haydn’s later symphonies, it is the slow introductions at the beginning of the first movements (only one of the London symphonies does without such an introduction) which, like the apparently casual opening lines of a Shakespeare play, most powerfully establish the drama and musical content of the whole work.

And the introduction to the 103rd is perhaps the most thrilling and unusual Haydn ever wrote, beginning – incredibly daringly – with the mysterious drum roll which gives this symphony its nickname. What follows the rumble of that distant thunder – a dark and sinewy line in the bassoons, cellos and double-basses, apparently based on the ancient Roman Catholic funeral chant of the Dies Irae – is then suddenly dispelled by a gorgeously light-hearted Allegro con spirito, music of apparently delicious innocence… until we start to notice that the fluttering and dancing melodies in the upper register are all subtle transformations of that dark chant from the beginning. Once more: ›incessant variety‹ all derived from a single idea.

In point of fact, London audiences of Haydn’s time, being mostly English Protestants, would have been unlikely to have noticed this religious reference by a deeply Catholic composer. But we know such things meant a great deal to Haydn. The previous August, 1794, on a visit to the English countryside south of London, he noted ruefully: »…the remains of a monastery which has already been standing for 600 years. I must confess that whenever I looked at this beautiful wilderness, my heart was oppressed at that thought that all this once belonged to my religion.« It was not only this aspect of the symphony that would have been somewhat elusive to the original London audiences. While they would no doubt have relished the sounds of rustic hunting horns that ring through the third and fourth movements of the symphony, and also the exciting and somewhat mysterious sense of a military march in the variations of the 2nd movement Andante – which they ›encored‹ at that first performance, no doubt warming to its kinship with the already extremely popular slow movement of the 100th symphony, ›The Military‹ they would almost certainly not have noticed the distinctly folk-like tunes in the second-movement Andante and in the terrifically energetic finale.

In the 19th century, when musical nationalism flourished, there was a serious attempt to suggest that the tunes Haydn is using here were actual Croatian dances and songs that he remembered from his childhood in the Austrian-Hungarian borderlands where such music flourished. Modern scholarship has been more sceptical of this idea. And perhaps we will never know how specific Haydn was being. But one thing is clear: in this music, written in England over the winter of 1794–5 and for a London audience, he was certainly playing with the kind of music he had known all his life in his native country, just as – from his early childhood as a choirboy in Vienna – he had known the Dies irae. As his time in England was drawing to a close, Haydn’s mind, it seems, was turning back to where he came from.

And the introduction to the 103rd is perhaps the most thrilling and unusual Haydn ever wrote, beginning – incredibly daringly – with the mysterious drum roll which gives this symphony its nickname. What follows the rumble of that distant thunder – a dark and sinewy line in the bassoons, cellos and double-basses, apparently based on the ancient Roman Catholic funeral chant of the Dies Irae – is then suddenly dispelled by a gorgeously light-hearted Allegro con spirito, music of apparently delicious innocence… until we start to notice that the fluttering and dancing melodies in the upper register are all subtle transformations of that dark chant from the beginning. Once more: ›incessant variety‹ all derived from a single idea.

In point of fact, London audiences of Haydn’s time, being mostly English Protestants, would have been unlikely to have noticed this religious reference by a deeply Catholic composer. But we know such things meant a great deal to Haydn. The previous August, 1794, on a visit to the English countryside south of London, he noted ruefully: »…the remains of a monastery which has already been standing for 600 years. I must confess that whenever I looked at this beautiful wilderness, my heart was oppressed at that thought that all this once belonged to my religion.« It was not only this aspect of the symphony that would have been somewhat elusive to the original London audiences. While they would no doubt have relished the sounds of rustic hunting horns that ring through the third and fourth movements of the symphony, and also the exciting and somewhat mysterious sense of a military march in the variations of the 2nd movement Andante – which they ›encored‹ at that first performance, no doubt warming to its kinship with the already extremely popular slow movement of the 100th symphony, ›The Military‹ they would almost certainly not have noticed the distinctly folk-like tunes in the second-movement Andante and in the terrifically energetic finale.

In the 19th century, when musical nationalism flourished, there was a serious attempt to suggest that the tunes Haydn is using here were actual Croatian dances and songs that he remembered from his childhood in the Austrian-Hungarian borderlands where such music flourished. Modern scholarship has been more sceptical of this idea. And perhaps we will never know how specific Haydn was being. But one thing is clear: in this music, written in England over the winter of 1794–5 and for a London audience, he was certainly playing with the kind of music he had known all his life in his native country, just as – from his early childhood as a choirboy in Vienna – he had known the Dies irae. As his time in England was drawing to a close, Haydn’s mind, it seems, was turning back to where he came from.